Women’s Work and Women Agricultural Labourers: Study of the Indian Census

Abstract

It is by now almost an axiom with demographers, labour economists and economic historians that Indian census data on women's economic activity are seriously flawed. Undercounting and changes in definition from one census to the next are held to have rendered the numbers volatile and unreliable. Most and analyst studying labour force changes overtime concentrate therefore on the data for men, and tend to draw conclusions for the working population on this basis. I wish to argue in this paper that the data on women, while flawed,  can tell us a considerable amount about women in the labour force, pro- vided we are careful to sort out the good census years from the bad, and are clear about the questions we want answered. Furthermore, male labour force data cannot be used as a proxy for women, at least in the case of agricultural labourers.